Principal components-based investigative study of counter measures to financial crimes

Abstract

Financial crime is presently a very serious threat to the global, regional and national economies as it manifests itself in several financial institutions and government agencies. One of the reasons for the thriving status of the menace has been lack of globally acknowledged counter measures. Based on this, twenty eight indices that were considered to be related to financial crimes were formulated in this research. A questionnaire was formulated based on the indices and administered on selected financial related agencies and parastatals in States across Nigeria to obtain relevant data which were subjected to Principal Component Analyses (PCA) using SPSS. The analyses showed that effective citizens' control and monitoring, economic and social stability, moral suasion and political security and goodwill are the much desired counter-measures to financial crime. The percentage of relevance of these measures was 64.17%, indicating that the indices of some extraneous counter-measures were not given consideration in the research. Such measures include but not limited to good governance, financial security and moral training. A coefficient score matrix was also generated for the estimation and ranking of the contribution of every respondent to the extracted counter-measures.